6. Augustine, letters 28 and 40, in Saint Augustine: Letters, vol. 1 (1–82), trans. Wilifrid Parsons (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1951), 93–98 and 172–179. For an outline of this debate, see Boniface Ramsey, “Two Traditions on Lying and Deception in the Ancient Church,” Thomist 49 (1985): 504–33.
7. Lombard, The Sentences, bk. III, dist. 38, chs. 1–5, 157–61.
8. John Downame, A Treatise Against Lying (London, 1636), 15, sets the tone for the rest of the work when he begins his second chapter, “Wherein it is shewed what a Lye is,” with one of Augustine’s definitions of a lie: “Saint Augustine briefely defineth it thus; A Lye is a false signification with a will to deceive.”
9. Pascal, The Mystery of Jesuitisme, unpaginated prefatory material by Henry Hammond. Random capitalizations found in the original.
10. Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, trans. Thomas M’Crie (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1880), “Letter IX,” 270.
11. Pascal, Provincial Letters, “Letter IX,” 277–78. I have slightly altered the translation. For the original see Les Provinciales, in Pascal: Edition definitive des Oeuvres Complètes, vol. II, ed. Fortunat Strowski (Paris: Libraire Ollendorff, 1926), 94.
12. Pascal, Les Provinciales, “Letter IX,” 278.
13. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 3 (4)–(6), 129–33.
14. For Augustine’s philosophical influences, see Gerard Watson, “St. Augustine and the Inner Word: The Philosophical Background,” Irish Theological Quarterly 54 (1988): 81–92, and Marcia Colish, “The Stoic Theory of Verbal Signification,” in Archéologie de signe, ed. Lucie Brind’Amour and Eugene Vance (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 1982), 17–43.
15. Augustine, On the Trinity, bk. 15, chs. 10 and 11 (18–20), 185–88. Christopher Kirwan, “Augustine’s Philosophy of Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, 195–201. See also Paul Vincent Spade, “The Semantics of Terms,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzman et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 186–204, here, 188–90. Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De trinitate,” Journal of Religion 63:2 (April 1983): 125–42, discusses the function of vision and visual metaphors in Augustine’s theology.
16. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 2.2.3, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 56–59. See also R. A. Markus, “St. Augustine on Signs,” Phronesis 2:1 (1957): 60–83, here, 70–76.
17. John 1:1–16.
18. Augustine, On the Trinity, bk. 15 (23), 194–95.
19. Augustine, On the Trinity, bk. 15 (20), 187. On the Christological underpinnings of Augustine’s theory of language, truth, and lies, see Mark D. Jordan, “Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana,” Augustinian Studies 11 (1980): 177–96, and Thomas Feehan, “The Morality of Lying in St. Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 21 (1990): 67–81.
20. Augustine, On the Trinity, bk. 15 (20), 189. Eileen Sweeney, “Hugh of St. Victor: The Augustinian Tradition of Sacred and Secular Reading Revised,” in Reading and Wisdom: The De Doctrina Christiana of Augustine in the Middle Ages, ed. Edward D. English (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 61–83, notes that Augustine makes similar arguments in the De doctrina christiana.
21. Augustine, On the Trinity, bk. 12 (16), p. 94. See Paul J. Griffiths’s excellent discussion, Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), 85–100, from which I have learned quite a bit.
22. Augustine, City of God, bk. 14, ch. 3, 586.
23. Augustine, On Lying, in Treatises on Various Subjects, ch. 3 (3), 55–56. See also Thomas Feehan, “Augustine on Lying and Deception,” Augustinian Studies 19 (1988):131–39.
24. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 12 (26), 160.
25. Augustine, On Lying, ch. 4 (4), 59 (with minor alterations to the translation). He reaches the same conclusion after a similar analysis of scenarios at ch. 13 (22), 81–82, and in Soliloquies, trans. Thomas F. Gilligan (New York: CIMA Publishing, Co., 1948), bk. 2, ch. 9 (16), 399, where he distinguishes the falsity of storytellers from that of deceivers.
26. I follow Griffiths, Lying, 29, who writes, “Duplicity is, to say it again, the evil proper to lying, and I read Augustine as claiming that this is both necessary and sufficient for the lie. That the lie is usually also accompanied by an intention to deceive is true and of interest, but it does not pick out what is most deeply characteristic of the lie, and is not relevant to the exceptionless ban on the lie that Augustine advocates.”
27. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 15 (32), 166.
28. Augustine, On Lying, 14 (25), 86–88.
29. Augustine, On Lying, ch. 21 (42 and 43), 109.
30. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 15 (32), 165–66.
31. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 9 (20), 147. The story of Lot, his guests, and his daughters can be found at Genesis 19:1–11.
32. The story about the midwives appears at Exodus 1:19, Jacob’s claim to be Esau at Genesis 27:1–40, Abraham’s assertion that Sarah is his sister at Genesis 20:2, and Jesus’s long walk at Luke 24:28.
33. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 15 (31), 164.
34. Augustine, On Lying, ch. 8 (11), 70–71.
35. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 15 (32–33), 165–67.
36. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 10 (23), 151–52.
37. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 10 (24), 152–53.
38. Augustine, On Lying, ch. 5 (7), 62.
39. Augustine, Against Lying, ch. 10 (24), 152–55.
40. Lombard, The Sentences III, dist. XXXVIII, chs. 1–6, 156–61. Marcia Colish kindly confirmed this suspicion when I asked her about it via e-mail.
41. Aquinas, Summa of Theology II-II, quest. 110, art. 3, resp., in 1666.
42. Aquinas, Summa of Theology II-II, quest. 109, art. 3, resp. and replies 1 and 3, 1662–63.
43. Aquinas, Summa of Theology II-II, quest. 110, art. 1, resp., 1664. This reading of Thomas is much indebted to John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 154–63.
44. I follow Griffiths, Lying, 173–75, who makes this observation about Thomas.
45. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), cap. 12, n. 7, 65, cited and interpreted (though not quoted) in Finnis, Aquinas, 161, ft. 138.
46. John Buridan, Super decem libros ethicorum (Paris, 1513, rprt. Frankfurt: Minerva G.M.B.H., 1968), LXXXVIIIr. Dante offers a markedly similar account of the dehumanizing effects of lying in the Inferno. See Joan Ferrante, “The Relation of Speech to Sin in the Inferno,” Dante Studies 87 (1969): 33–46.
47. Aquinas, Summa of Theology II-II, quest. 110, art. 3, reply 4, 1667. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, 28–31, notes the future importance of Thomas’s creative reinterpretation of Augustine’s exegesis. He ignores the significance of Thomas’s alignment of truth and justice.
48. For the story of Bishop Firmus, see Augustine, On Lying, ch. 13 (23), 84–85. Emily Corran, “Hiding the Truth: Exegetical Discussions of Abraham’s Lies from Hugh of Saint Victor to Stephen Langton,” Historical Research (forthcoming), demonstrates that twelfth-century theologians were already debating how to make sense of Augustine’s discussion of Abraham’s claim that Sarah was his sister.
49. Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica, vol. 4 (Quaracchi: Rome, 1979), pars II, inq. III, tractatus II, sect. I, quaest. II, titulus VIII, cap. VI, 582A/B. The jury is still out on the complete authenticity of this treatise and the extent to which it contains redactions and interpolations from Alexander’s students, especially Jean de la Rochelle. On the treatise’s authorship and its continuing importance as a marker of mid-thirteenth-century Franciscan theology, see Casagrande and Vecchio, Les péchés de la langue, 143–44. For convenience, I will refer only to Alexander as the author.
50. Ale
xander of Hales, Summa theologica, inq. III, tractatus III, sect. II, quaest. II, cap. I, vol. 3, 402, and pars II, inq. III, vol. 4, 581b.
51. This interpretation would prove controversial, and both Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus would reject it. The story can be found at 2 Kings 10.
52. Summarizing this lengthy section, Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica, pars II, inq. III, tractatus II, sect. I, quaest. I, vol. 4, 581a/b, writes: “Dicendum ergo generaliter quod mendacium de se dicit vituperabile et contrarium veritati, et ideo non potest recte fieri, sive sit in voluntate, sicut primo modo, sive in facto, sicut secundo modo, sive in dicto, sicet tertio modo. Solvendum ergo per interemptionem, cum dicit quod mendacium potest esse licitum in operibus simulatis. Non est enim mendacium simulatio cautelae vel doctrinae vel figurae in facto, sed illa quae est duplicitatis et fallaciae.”
53. John Duns Scotus, In librum tertium sententiarum, dist. 38, quaest. 1, art. 1. For a facing-page translation of the entire question, see John Duns Scotus, Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, trans. Allan B. Wolter (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 484–85. Richard Cross, “Duns Scotus on Goodness, Justice, and What God Can Do,” Journal of Theological Studies 48 (1997): 67, n. 61, corrects several defects in Wolter’s Latin text. For a concise summary of Scotus’s conception of the relation between voluntarism and ethics, see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89–95. Scotus, Cross suggests, 192, n. 79, probably holds that while lying is not intrinsically evil, it can never be in accord with the intrinsic nature of things. “After all,” Cross writes, “God can dispense from the obligation not to lie; and we presumably would want to claim that under such circumstances lying is not morally bad.” For an overview of thirteenth-century ethical debates about voluntarism, see Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995).
54. Scotus, In librum tertium sententiarum, dist. 38, quaest. 1, art. 1, opinio 3, 486–87.
55. Scotus, In librum tertium sententiarum, dist. 38, quaest. 1, art. 2, ad. 4, in Duns Scotus, 496–97.
56. Scotus, In librum tertium sententiarum, dist. 38, quaest. 1, art. 2, ad. 4, in Duns Scotus, trans. Wolter, 496–97. Compare this reading of Scotus’s position with Silvana Vechio, “Mensonge, Simulation, Dissimulation,” in Vestigia, Imagines, Verba: Semiotics and Logic in Medieval Theological Texts (XIIth–XIVth century), ed. Constantine Marmo (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 126, who stresses Scotus’s “condamnation absolue du mensonge verbal.”
57. For a brief overview of the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s Ethics, see George Weiland, “The Reception and Interpretation of Aristotle’s Ethics,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 657–72.
58. Albert the Great, Super Ethica IV, in Opera Omnia, vol. 14a, ed. W. Kübel (Münster: Aschendorff, 1968), lectio 14, 288. For a fuller account of Albert’s position, see M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 67–73. Anthony J. Celano, “The End of Practical Wisdom: Ethics as Science in the Thirteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33:2 (April 1995): 225–43, discusses the significance and lasting influence of Albert’s distinction between the civil and the theological and its relation to prudence. “In Albert’s science of ethics,” he writes, 238–39, “prudence, supreme in genere politicorum, is merely a means to a superior good, when considered in relation to contemplative happiness.”
59. Bonaventure, Sententiarum, III, dist. XXXVIII, quaest. 2, conclusio, ratio1 and confirmatio, 843. See John F. Quinn, “Bonaventure on Our Natural Obligation to Confess Truth,” Franciscan Studies 35 (1975): 194–211. Contrast with Mireille Vincent-Cassy, “Recherches sur le mensonge au Moyen ge,” in Études sur la sensibilité au Moyen Age, Congrès national des sociétés savantes, France (1977), 165–73.
60. Thomas Aquinas, Summa of Theology, I, quaest. 16, art. 6, ad. 2.
61. Anselm, De veritate, in Anselm of Canterbury, 4 vols., vol. 2, ed. and trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1974–76), ch. 5, 82–84.
62. Anselm, De veritate, ch. 8, 87–89.
63. Anselm, De veritate, ch. 13, 99–102. For a similar reading of Anselm’s De veritate, see Eileen Sweeney, Anselm of Canterbury, 181–96. Compare with Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams, Anselm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 41–56.
64. Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, quaest. 1, art. 4, reponsio, in Opera Omnia XXII, vol. I (Rome, 1975), 14.
65. Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, quaest. 1, art. 4, solutio, 14. On Thomas’s arguments against Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, see John F. Wippel, Medieval Reactions to the Encounter between Faith and Reason (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995).
66. Anselm, De veritate, ch. 2, 78–81.
67. Anselm, De veritate, ch. 13, 102.
68. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II, cap. 4, 34–36. On Thomas’s distinction between Truth and truths, see William Wood’s very useful essay, “Thomas Aquinas on the Claim That God Is Truth,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51:1 (2013): 21–47, especially 42–44.
69. Henri de Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 126–27 and 207–16.
70. Aquinas, Summa of Theology II-II, quest. 167, art. 1.
71. Anselm, Monologion, in Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 1, pref., 3. On monastic education and devotion, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catherine Mishari (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), 15–19, and Paul F. Gehl, “Competens Silentium: Varieties of Monastic Silence in the Medieval West,” Viator 18 (1987): 126–60.
72. Anselm, Proslogion, in Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 1, ch. 26, 112. Paul Gehl, “Mystical Language Models in Monastic Educational Psychology,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 14:2 (1984): 219–43, and Edward Synan, “Prayer, Proof and Anselm’s Proslogion,” in Standing before God: Studies on Prayer in Scriptures and in Tradition with Essays in Honor of John M. Oesterreicher, ed. Asher Finkel and Lawrence Frizzell (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1981), 267–88. More recently, Ian P. Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c. 1100–1333 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 52–71, who discusses the influence of context on monastic thought.
73. Wei, Intellectual Culture, 87–124, here, 122. Contrast with Marie Dominique Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans. and corrected by A. M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Regnery Publishing, 1964), 299, and Jacques LeGoff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavendar Fagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 79–82.
74. Marcia Colish, “Systematic Theology and Theological Renewal in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18:2 (1988): 135–56, here 155.
75. G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The Beginning of Theology as an Academic Discipline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 93–95. Along these lines, see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, quaest. 1, art. 6, ad. 3, where he distinguishes between knowledge of and possession of virtue.
76. Bok, Lying, 32–46.
77. On this obligation, see Denery, Seeing and Being Seen, 22–30.
78. David of Augsburg, De institutione novitiorum, in Bonaventure, Opera Omnia, vol. 12 (Paris: Vivès, 1868), 294.
79. On hypocrisy, see Frederic Amory, “Whited Sepulchres: The Semantic History of Hypocrisy to the High Middle Ages,” Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 53 (1986): 5–39.
80. Humbert of Romans, De eruditione praedicatorum, in De vita regulari, 2 vols., vol. II, ed. Joachim Joseph Berthier (Rome, 1889), 373–484. On Humbert’s treatise and mendicant tensions between public performance and inner intention, see Denery, Seeing and Being Seen, 19–38, and Claire Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures; Preaching, Performance and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Univ
ersity of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 31–56.
81. Johannes Nider, Praeceptorium: sive orthodoxea et accurata decalogi explicatio (Douay: Ioannis Bogardi, 1611), 126.
82. The seventeenth-century Catholic theologian Juan Caramuel writes as much in his Haplotes de restrictionibus mentalibus (Lyons, 1672), sig. OO 2: “The discussion here is not concerned with what the truth is, but with the grounds on which the truth rests. The question is not whether Peter is lying if he states that he does not know something that was confided to him under a seal of secrecy. For we are all bound to declare that in making such a denial he does not lie. But since Ipse dixit does not satisfy the fervour of intellects nowadays, we proceed further and wish to know, why Peter is not lying if he asserts that he does not know something that we presume he does know.” Cited and translated in A. E. Malloch, “Equivocation: A Circuit of Reasons,” in Familiar Colloquy: Essays Presented to Arthur Edward Barker, ed. Patricia Bruckmann (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1978), 132–43, here, 132.
83. Stefania Tutino, “Nothing but the Truth? Hermeneutics and Morality in the Doctrines of Equivocation and Mental Reservation in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 64:1 (Spring 2011): 115–55, frames the early modern discussion about lies in terms of these two historical moments. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, examines the question of lying in connection with religious belief.
84. Antoninus of Florence, Summae Sacra Theologiae (Venice: Bernardus Iuntus & Socios., 1571), pars secunda, titulus 10, cap. 1, 330r.
85. Nider, Praeceptorium, “Praeceptum Primum,” cap. 15, 124.
86. Antoninus, Summae, pars secunda, titulus 10, cap. 1, 330v. The story of Samuel and the calf can be found at 1 Samuel 16:1–5.
87. Antoninus, Summae, pars secunda, titulus 10, cap. 1, p. 330v. I follow Martin Stone’s translation of gabella in a now-retracted article. The story of Tobit and the angel can be found at Tobit 5: 5–18.
88. Antoninus, Summae, pars secunda, titulus 10, cap. 1, 330r.
89. Antoninus, Summae, pars secunda, titulus 10, cap. 1, 330v.
90. Sylvester Prierias, Sylvestrinae Summae, pars secunda, “De Mendacio & Mendace,” cols. 227–28.
The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment Page 33
